Heroic Will 25M - Need some help please!

Hey guys, my guild has spent 6 hours working on H Will so far but the lowest we got was 55% and it's been sloppy at best. I can't for the life of me figure out what we can do better. 37 pulls but we're not beating that learning curve as quickly as expected.

I just don't know how to make this any easier for the people in my guild. We're killing rages as they come out. We're running into an issue after we start getting courages out it seems. We have warlocks slowing them but they aren't dying fast enough if there is a dance going on at the same time. After we start losing too many people, we basically end up wiping. We went from 65% to 55% though with most of the same people up who weren't messing things up and only have two hunters who are successfully soaking while the 3rd always fails and ends up dead. I'm not an expert at this game so I can't explain people's classes to them.

Maybe our DPS is too low although it shouldn't be. Any advice is appreciated! Thank you in advance.

Why do you have 3 hunters soaking? 2 is enough with deterrence on a 1 minute CD. Assign a spread of backups to run in solo and soak if they notice a rogue spark (the hunter who was soaking that run called out on vent for us if they didn't make it). The backups all had a /s macro to announce they were going in for one and to get people to GTFO.

If the courages aren't dying fast enough, try maximize your uptime on them. With so many locks you can have portals from the middle to where each one spawns and assign a few dps to go over immediately (we had one rogue on each courage and they could almost solo them, you don't have any rogues but same basic idea). If the courages really aren't dying during dances, have some melee just abandon the dance. You don't know if the boss dps is going to be an issue if you're never hitting the enrage. Solve each problem as you get to it.

Once you get the first 6 rage waves down and into a nuke phase it becomes easier. From then on it's only 3 rage waves between nuke phases, the start bit is the hardest bit.

I don't have much advice for you regarding dps requirements and what-not, I've only killed it in 10m, however, explain to the hunter that is always derping, that the sparks take roughly 3-5 seconds to descend, so pop deterrence after a few seconds rather than straight away. If he is still dying after this, it might be time to find a new hunter.

As for the courages being dps'd slowly and losing melee to the dance, have the melee kill it until they are in dance range, and then have them switch off and have the range continue. It doesnt matter if it reaches the tank, just have freedoms ready to place on him, the courage itself does very little damage, its only the snare that is a problem, and only during dance phases.

Quickly looking over your logs to the damage done to both bosses, it seems as though only the tanks are damaging them at all, in 10m we can afford to have 1 melee on the bosses at all times, so if you can afford maybe 2-4 melee to stay on bosses full time the boss will die a LOT faster. (we kill it in just under 6mins).

first off, your hunter sucks at soaking if he keeps dying. Deterrence should stop it.

secondly, your strength tanks are taking a lot of avoidable damage, mainly from the smashes.

thirdly, since you got 2 mages, you can simply CC the first wave of rages, and then kill it with the second. this means you have more time to deal with the other adds, and that your AoE is more effective.

Just re-reading this and I may have misunderstood your problem with the dance... You have two tank specced people tanking strengths. So the courages are going to them right? (and therefore no where near dance slam range). If not, that defeats the point of having the strength tanks actually use a tank spec.

Dont know if this is of any use, but here's one of our kills from mostly a hunter soaker PoV (who's actually an alt with shit'ish gear as we had 0 hunters around and low on SP's) maybe your hunters finds it useful.

We are also doing what Nzall said, CCing the first wave of rages and killing them together with the second wave. Our Strenght tanks usually soak their own sparks afaik.

Just re-reading this and I may have misunderstood your problem with the dance... You have two tank specced people tanking strengths. So the courages are going to them right? (and therefore no where near dance slam range). If not, that defeats the point of having the strength tanks actually use a tank spec.

We had them tank spec to try and get the courages on them but for some reason it only works sometimes. I'm not sure if there is another trick to this to make that work or if we're just wasting two very high dps by keeping them in tank specs. I don't think we absolutely need a tank specced person tanking strengths, they could probably do it as a dps but the point was so the courages would go to them instead of to me and the other tank (I'm the druid). I've made my fair share of mistakes as well but courages end up destroying us in the end.

We had them tank spec to try and get the courages on them but for some reason it only works sometimes. I'm not sure if there is another trick to this to make that work or if we're just wasting two very high dps by keeping them in tank specs. I don't think we absolutely need a tank specced person tanking strengths, they could probably do it as a dps but the point was so the courages would go to them instead of to me and the other tank (I'm the druid). I've made my fair share of mistakes as well but courages end up destroying us in the end.

We ran into exactly the same problem, with it not working sometimes. What we think caused it is the courages actually having a maximum range on their fixate, and the off tanks need to be the further away one, but still within that maximum range. When they tanked right on the wall, the courages sometimes ignored them, but if they stood 5-10yd further in, it wasn't a problem. Just take care to still be further away than the main tanks.

If you want the strength tanks to be soaking the courages they need to be the furthest away from the spawn, when they spawn close to the back of the room it makes that pretty difficult. Theres not a great deal of upside to having them tank spec.

Should we just have them stay DPS instead then? I know people dps tanked them in normals but is that viable on heroic? I also know having a warrior tanking a strength then soaking isn't really ideal. We're probably going to have to change that up tonight and try something else.

---------- Post added 2013-02-13 at 01:35 PM ----------

Originally Posted by Gnolp

We ran into exactly the same problem, with it not working sometimes. What we think caused it is the courages actually having a maximum range on their fixate, and the off tanks need to be the further away one, but still within that maximum range. When they tanked right on the wall, the courages sometimes ignored them, but if they stood 5-10yd further in, it wasn't a problem. Just take care to still be further away than the main tanks.

Yeah we were yelling at them to stay at the wall and they were already there. Wasn't much we could do about it.

We used to struggle a bit... But then we just made sure we had 2-3 people on each courage and the rest of our DPS went on and focused on gripping, stunning and burning Rages down asap.

After we burned down every single pack of Rages, we'd swap a bit to Strenghts... DoT them up etc, back on rages when they spawned. When the "break" between spawns came, we'd finish last pack of rages, leave the Strenght to "tanks" (was 2 rogues in our case) and we'd just swap to the two bosses.

And when it comes to Hunters soaking... I can speak from first hand it can be a bit annoying soaking them sometimes, specially if your DPS isn't burning rages down at same rate, or doesn't keep them in place. The only tricky bit is you can't really soak if your deterrence has 1 second before it runs out and you need to wait few seconds for sparks to descent down a bit. It takes about a second for spark to actually drop down from the air after you touch it and only then it's going to explode. So if you touch the spark when you have deterrence on and it runs out when spark actually "explodes", you'll die. Altho I noticed it sometimes helps if you just jump & disengage, touch the spark and just fly past it without getting hit by its AoE, so it's possible to soak even without deterrence up, but its risky.

Sometimes we'd also just nuke single spark down that either spawned bit too late or early and couldn't be soaked by me or the other two hunters we had, to just make it easy and save other "soakers" for bit more hairy situations.

Courages really shouldn't be a big issue, just make sure your dps moves to the spawning points of the Courages as soon as Rages are down (can even assign a couple people to finish em off while the others run to Courage-spots) in order to kill them. You can see in our video they are killed before they reach the middle at times, but basically you will most likely run into problems if your dps starts moving late, ie when the Courages have already spawned.

Should we just have them stay DPS instead then? I know people dps tanked them in normals but is that viable on heroic? I also know having a warrior tanking a strength then soaking isn't really ideal. We're probably going to have to change that up tonight and try something else.

They don't melee, at all. The only reason you would want them to be in tank spec is to get the courages on them and so they can hold agro if you are having your ranged nuke it, which is un-necessary.

Lots of really good feedback. Thanks guys! I'm going to pass this onto my raid tonight and see how things go. We're losing a day thanks to valentines. = /

We have 3 dps on each courage (2 locks on left w/70% slow glyphed and one ret paladin, 1 lock, fury warrior and after we replaced the spriest with the dk I think a ww monk). That video was very helpful btw especially since it's from the hunter PoV. I think the only video I posted on our site before hand was from a tank PoV which isn't super useful lol.

I'm glad if it's of use, as I'm sure is one of our MT's who had to log his hunter just to be a soak-bot
Soaking definitely seems more manageable as a hunter compared to a SP, as I originally did it on my Shadowpriest, who's not in that kill. Op Disengage!